Online music service Napster has been down for over a week with a glitch that many experts believe will seriously dent its plans to become the Internet's dominant provider of online music subscriptions.
Messages on Napster's Web site say the service is down while technicians update a system that will allow the fail-safe identification of the millions of songs listed on the company's servers. The idea is to comply with a court decision ordering Napster to halt the swapping of copyrighted material, and also to prepare the company's system for the promised launch of a subscription-based music service later this month.
The disabling of the site, which until recently was identified as one of the most popular applications on the Internet, might be regarded as a huge victory for the record industry which has pursued Napster with a vengeance ever since the company was launched by a bored 18-year-old student, Shawn Fanning, in 1999.
Napster's peer-to-peer system allowed music fans to easily identify and download music from other people's computers. It amassed over 80 million users until court decisions forced it to start limiting the number of songs available.
Now Napster users have abandoned the system in droves, but they are hardly heading to the record stores to buy CDs. Instead they are flocking to numerous alternative music swapping sites, many of them impossible to shut down because they are not run by any company but instead work by installing a small piece of software that resides on the computer of every user.
Even before Napster shut down its servers, members were migrating to the elusive competitors, most of which are based loosely around the so-called Gnutella system. The latest version of this software is called Gnucleus and was invented by an 18-year-old student just out of high school.
"If the recording industry thought Napster was a headache, it's going to get a genuine migraine from the latest version of Gnucleus," said Hal Plotkin, who covers the Internet for financial news channel CNBC. "It can't be put out of business by the record industry or the government, because it's not a business, it's just a piece of free software."
Ironically, the disabling of Napster has proved a huge boon to such file sharing services. The popularity of these alternative systems bodes ill for the future of Napster's fee-paying service and other similar projects planned by the music industry.
Napster already has a licensing deal with EMI Group, AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann's BMG, all of which are part of MusicNet, a subscription joint venture with RealNetworks Inc. Under the deal, Napster would get these labels' content once it provides a legitimate service that pays royalties.
But the protracted outage has severely dented Napster's user base, and many Napster fans are adamant they won't pay for the new service.
"The Napster brand still has equity with consumers but each day that new service doesn't go up, that equity will drop," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst with research firm GartnerG2.
"I have the greatest respect in the world for Napster and what they're doing, but unfortunately they now have a user base of zero.
While Napster executives still believe that music fans will pay a small monthly amount in order to access music legally and use the other facilities on the site, many Napster users think otherwise.
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